E-mail is fast becoming a predominant means of personal and business communication. Paper-based communication is replaced to a large extent by electronic communication in the form of e-mail. Individual and organizations rely heavily on e-mail communications. As such, disruption of e-mail services or loss of e-mails may have severe implications. Recently, Gmail users complained of lost e-mails and access denial. The loss was caused by a bug hosted during the storage software update by Google. Google has since stopped the software update process.

Initially, Google reported that the bug has resulted in disruption of services to 0.08% of the users, which was later revised to 0.02% of Google e-mail users. Thousands of Gmail users reported missing mails and login failure. Google is investigating the issue and trying to resolve the problem. The affected users may unable to login during the course of investigation.

Last year, Google reported creation of multiple data centers to facilitate recovery in case of disaster. The latest note released on the official Gmail blog site states that some software bugs may damage even data stored at multiple data centers. Security professionals at Google are trying to recover data from offline tapes. The official blog adds that data recovery from tapes may take several hours. The latest update on the company’s application status dashboard states that Gmail service has been restored to several users and experts are trying to restore services to remaining 0.012% of Gmail users. The company cautions that e-mails sent to the affected accounts between 6:00 PM pacific standard time (PST) on February 27 and 2:00 PM PST on February 28 may not have been delivered. Senders of the e-mails may have received a failure notification.

The disruption in services may have adverse implications on organizational users, who may loss important communication related to business. Loss of critical information may also have financial implications on business. Moreover, disasters are unpredictable in nature. Therefore, organizations must have robust disaster recovery mechanisms in place to facilitate timely retrieval of the lost information. Organizations face a wide range of threats in the prevalent IT scenario. As such, they must hire computer incident managers, computer forensic experts, computer science degree holders, penetration testers and security analysts.

Organizations must encourage security professionals to undertake online degree programs related to disaster recovery, business continuity and incident management. Knowledge of disaster recovery mechanisms may help professionals in dealing with adverse circumstances.

Aspiring IT professionals may benefit from various online university degree programs in cyber security, network security, disaster recovery and business continuity and computer forensic courses. Such courses may also facilitate industries in hiring well-informed security professionals, who are not only technically sound, but are also aware of the latest developments in the field.

EC-Council University is based in Albuquerque, New Mexico and offers Master of Security Science (MSS) degree to students from various backgrounds such as graduates, IT Professionals, and military students amongst several others. The MSS is offered as a 100% online degree program and allows EC-Council University to reach students from not only the United States, but from all around the world.

EC-Council is a member-based organization that certifies individuals in cybersecurity and e-commerce skills. It is the owner and developer of 16 security certifications, including Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH), Computer Hacking Forensics Investigator (CHFI) and EC-Council Certified Security Analyst (ECSA)/License Penetration Tester (LPT). Its certificate programs are offered in over 60 countries around the world.

EC-Council has trained over 80,000 individuals and certified more than 30,000 members, through more than 450 training partners globally. These certifications are recognized worldwide and have received endorsements from various government agencies including the U.S. federal government via the Montgomery GI Bill, Department of Defense via DoD 8570.01-M, National Security Agency (NSA) and the Committee on National Security Systems (CNSS). EC-Council also operates the global series of Hacker Halted security conferences.